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Comment by dkrich | Hacker News Reader

The overall theme (as an American who has never visited Japan) seems to be one of risk-aversion vs. risk-insensitivity.

In the U.S., the culture embraces risk and risk-takers, if most of us don't actually live out these ideals ourselves.

It seems employees in Japan don't want to risk unemployment, while companies don't want to risk losing employees, while apartments don't want to risk extending credit to anybody who doesn't have a job with a recognized company.

In the U.S. it could certainly be argued that we're way too credit and risk embracing. However, it's also very likely that most of our economic growth in the last century is because we've been able to get credit and that we're a society that takes risks. Americans can be irresponsible, but this description sounds like the other extreme.

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From living in Japan for 11 years, I would say that is a very astute observation.

Japanese are extremely risk-averse, and extremely safety-minded in general. It is helpful to keep that in mind when considering the "weirdness" of many things they do.

Add to this a strong sense of community first - which means that it is more important that you fit into a readily understood place in society, the company, etc.

A self-employed foreigner? We don't have a checkbox for him. His name doesn't fit into our kanji boxes. What if he doesn't take the garbage out in the correct manner?

It sounds ridiculous, but it's really no more than "that's not how we do things around here" you'll find anywhere, but taken to an extreme.

That said, I find most people to be quite kind and helpful. The system is what usually gives the problems.

"What if he doesn't take the garbage out in the correct manner?"

Funny example. We stayed at a place rented through airbnb last weekend in Tokyo that had a three ring binder containing only a 10 page guide on how to properly sorry the recycling. And even with that, I'm 100% sure we got it wrong.

Yep, the recycling/trash system is nightmarish. Furnishing a new apartment (they don't typically come with anything, including a washer or fridge) results in a huge amount of packaging (the Japanese absolutely love to box, rebox, bag, rebag, wrap, rewrap, etc.) which makes your first month a very nasty lesson in how trash pickup works and doesn't.

Argh. I haven't even thought of that. Moving into a new apartment in Tokyo in 1 weeks time.

On the same logic moving out of a place requires planning in advance what to throw and when. You're moving on saturday and have to throw your remaining cleaning stuff ? Too bad, non burning garbage is on tuesday. If your building doesn't have a garbage room you'll be pissing off the neighbourhood for 4 days.

I was going to justify all the complexity by an extremely good recycling rate, but it seems Japan is at 20% on average, which is behind 16 other countries [0], way behind South Korea.

[0] http://www.pinterest.com/pin/129830401728417991/

If you are moving out, then you bring the trash of the old apartment with you and you throw it the day that you are supposed to throw it in the new neighborhood. It is a no-brainer for Japanese. Been there, seen that. :)

Are they secretly Swiss? Or the Swiss secretly Japanese?

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/11pcs1/while_i_li...

I think someone answered for you

"Switzerland sounds like Germany on steroids, with Finnish bureaucracy, that upstairs neighbour, the optimism of your grandma, that smartass from fifth grade and Japanese punctuality."

Yes, Germany is "laid back" compared to good old CH. And any old woman in the streets will speak English to you. Oh, the only homeless I saw was wearing a jersey from a (different) country

True. Tight hierarchical social conditioning from birth. If reasonably fluent in Japanese and of European stock what is an all too frequent response to unorthodox queries? Shikataganai. In English that's usually translated as "it can't be helped" but the kanji suggest an even deeper meaning. A more literal translation would be: an official received methodology does not exist (so no action on my part will be taken). By extension this suggests that only received ways of doing things should be employed (which you should know already, gaikokujin). At least that's the way the social concept was explained to me by a Tokyo-based book illustrator friend with a philosophical bent during a recent visit.

>True. Tight hierarchical social conditioning from birth.

Yeah, but only as opposed to tight individualism conditioning from birth.

Agreed. At the extreme one configuration culminates in a sclerotic dystopia and the other into a dysfunctional freak-show. But even if someone were smart enough to scare-up and responsibly impose a configuration which optimized individuality and mutuality based on actual human nature (which exhibits a tendency towards a Peircean pragmatism) what's going to prevent abuse by the powers-that-be then charged with managing and maintaining the social structure? As the old behaviourist Skinner put it over 40 years ago: who's going to control the controllers? AI? Sounds like a plot lifted from the old cold-war SF movie "Colossus - The Forbin Project (1970)". As they say, shikata ga nai, neh?

I always heard "shouganai" rather than "shikataganai". Looked it up and found out neither is wrong [1]. Shouganai is actually shortened from shiyouganai (using the same shi kanji as shikatagani) so that can be used to get the kanji. Although apparently the meanings are almost identical according to this answer.

[1] http://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/8231/how-do-thes...

'Shouganai' struck me as more urban where the locals chatter at 200 words per minute. If you ever visit the back-country like Okayama Prefecture and pose one of those 'riyuu o fushigi ni omoi masu ...' (wonder why ..) questions you can still elicit both a stoic face and a 'shikataganai' in response. BTW, Jim Breen's Monash U website:

http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/cgi-bin/wwwjdic.cgi?1E

is still a good haunt for researching J-colloquialisms (ad nauseam) when and if you're in the mood. He's a retired IT prof and a friend of Jack Halpern, composer of a popular JE character dictionary.

If I can just follow up on my own post...

I don't think I made it obvious, but the average Japanese person tend to be just as frustrated with this whole system as you or I would be. This isn't some inherit trait they all have from birth. The "Taro"'s of Japan, who always manage to find their way through a loophole & will go out of their way to help you find it, are quite common.

A story, that may only be urban myth but was certainly believed to be true:

After the 3/11 tsunami, when the govt. was engaged in its usual slow response fumbling, a US military helicopter was trying to deliver supplies to the region, but red tape prevented them from unloading. So the chopper crew claimed they were having engine troubles & needed to reduce the weight for takeoff, and dumped the pallets.

This became one of the favorite stories in Japan and was universally considered to be a clever way to get around the bureaucracy (rather than people not following the rules, as you might think).

One of the reasons Taro knows that Lloyds is the intermediary is because he'll probably want to use that to help him with some similar situation someday.

The environment is set up such that you have to be risk averse. If you can't fire someone for incompetence, you're going to go the extra mile to make sure the person you hire is competent. Ultimately that means hiring through social connections. You have a friend who knows someone looking for work, and it reflects badly on him if your hire doesn't work out.

And your new hire knows it, so if there's a problem he not only loses a job (ultimately), but he loses a connection to find another job.

Same goes with the apartment. Japan is famous for the difficulty in getting people out of an apartment. The harder it is to get people out the more pre-qualification you need to do up front as a landlord. So you demand not only that the tenant can demonstrate a stable job history, but that he has a lifetime job at a company that's willing to get involved if you have a dispute. Because if things go sour and you don't have outside leverage, you might have to go to the local mobsters to convince your tenant to leave.

The US has also had a quickly growing population. It takes a lot of economic growth just to keep everybody on the same level when the population is growing. Because the pie is getting larger for everyone, there's less payoff in trying to protect an existing slice. I wonder if the dynamics will still be the same when the US's population growth tails off.

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